Simple Tips When Maintenance Issues are a Challenge

By Ricky Smith CMRP

Maintenance teams in a large number of plants face tough challenges every day. They come to
work not knowing what they will face when they arrive because of equipment reliability issues. I
found that by executing a few new ideas, they can make a major difference in the reliability and
uptime of their equipment. My hope is that this article provides you with a few ideas to take the
next step at your site.

"It Isn't What You Know That Will Kill You; It's What You
Don't Know That Will."
There is an old saying, "You cannot eat an elephant all in one bite, but you can eat it one bite at
a time." Let us begin by looking at some of the known problems that maintenance and reliability
managers encounter on a daily basis:
1. Breakdowns are frequent - the causes are many.
2. Not enough maintenance is performed - cutbacks typically hit maintenance staff first.

Do these two problems drive you crazy? These problems, and many others, always drove me
crazy when I was in maintenance management. Then I found a few steps that made all the
difference between success and failure, which is not as drastic a difference as you may think. In
fact, I have learned over the years that the difference between these two outcomes is exactly as
shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The distance between success and failure

Trust me, I have been where you are. As a former maintenance supervisor, I had to know the
truth about where my program stood and develop a plan to overcome our primary obstacles, so
that my crew could be successful. Those obstacles were:
• Performing preventive maintenance on equipment that continues to break down.
• Planner constantly chasing parts.
• Not enough staff to complete all of the daily work.
• Completing a repair just to see it again next week.
• Production blaming maintenance for equipment problems.

Based on all I have stated so far, I developed a few key questions to ask myself. This took a
while; I am not a fast thinker or a quick learner. However, once I resolved these questions and
overcame these problems, the reliability and maintainability of our assets went up. This
immediately made my life, production's life, and my crew's life easier.
So, what are the four steps that, if followed, will make a large impact on the maintainability and
reliability of your equipment?

Step #1: Upgrade the Reliability and Maintainability of Your

Assets
After thinking about this concept, I knew there was only one thing a maintenance person would
focus on: making the equipment maintainable, and thus reliable, to meet the intent of the end
user-production. Listed below is the process I followed to achieve this goal:
1. Identify with production management-you want production to be a partner in this
effort-what the most critical equipment in the worst condition is. Remember that it does not
matter what we consider to be critical, but rather, what production management thinks is
critical and can deliver immediate results if it were reliable.
2. Develop a plan with your crew and production to upgrade this equipment to a maintainable
and reliable level.
3. Identify all the problems with this equipment using all techniques and technologies available
at the time, including production data on the equipment.
4. Implement or ensure maintenance has a fully functional maintenance planning and
scheduling role.
5. Execute your plan together with production and your crew, ensuring that all repairs are
made using effective, repeatable procedures with specifications and standards. Perform a
quality assurance/quality control check to validate that the work was completed to
specifications. At this time of need, all egos must be checked at the door.
6. Once all of the work is complete, commission the equipment using as many predictive
maintenance technologies as possible, along with production process data. Since a person
cannot predict failure, condition-based monitoring is a much more accurate representation
of what is truly being performed.
7. Post a sign on the equipment that states: "WARNING: Maintained equipment in this area"
(see Figure 2 - warning sign). Establish an agreement between your crew and production
to maintain this equipment to "like new" conditions no matter what. The results will shock
you, so record the production output increase once the equipment is up and running.

Warning:
Maintained Equipment
in this AREA
"Proactive Maintenance Only in this Area"

Byorduofthes1temanager

Figure 2: Warning sign example

8. Since people's memories are very short, post the results that you achieve by the equipment,
and make sure that they are updated daily by your production partner. One of the best items
to display is mean time between failure {MTBF) of specific "best actor'' assets. Put this by the
equipment on a weekly basis, as shown in Figure 3.

Date

Figure 3: Mean time between failure (MTBF) example - 900 electric motors (compliments of
Kim Hunt - Domtar)

9. Develop an effective Failure Modes Driven Strategy for the equipment-identifying failure
modes, causes of failures, etc. to build a solid maintenance plan using preventive
maintenance, predictive, and condition-based monitoring.
10. Move to the next piece of equipment based on production management's input, and
complete the steps the same way you did for the last one.

If you follow this same process, you will be successful in improving your assets' reliability and
maintainability while meeting the requirements of production.

Step# 2: Identify Where You Are and Where You Are Going
by Using Simple Metrics That Measure EFFECTIVENESS.
Having the right effectiveness metrics in place and focused on continuous improvement is the
answer. A great example would be if preventive maintenance (PM) compliance is above 98%,
but the equipment continues to fail. It does not make sense, right? Well, have you ever thought
about using a line graph that shows the correlation between PM labor hours and emergency
labor hours in order to measure PM effectiveness? You must know where you are before you
can begin a journey. See Figure 4, and if the results are not acceptable, you may want to review
Step #1 again. PM compliance is a metric that only measures if PMs are completed on time. It is
a joke in many organizations.
 700

600

500

400

300

200

100

Jan Feb
I
Mar Apr May June
I I
July Aug Sept Nov Dec

Figure 4: PM vs. emergency labor hours

With this one metric, you will know where you are with your current PM program. Once you
know where you are, you can begin to develop a plan to head in the right direction.

Step #3: Use Maintenance Dashboards to Manage an Area or

Function

Plant Maintenance/Reliability Dashboard

Maintenance
Rework
Cost

100% 40% 100% 47% 78% 12%

" You cannot manage what you do not measure"

- Peter Drucker

Simple Tips for Managing Maintenance Effectively

1. Accurate Work Order Close-out is critical to good data - Maintenance Planner should close out work orders only
2. Repeatable Procedures to ensure a repeatable process, steps and specifications are a requirement
3. Post a Maintenance Scoreboard for all to see and to understand their "Score in the Game# (leading and lagging KPls)
4. Repeat Equipment Failures are 'Unacceptable" and must be mitigated thru RCA Techniques
1

5. Knowledge is critical of Best Practices for Maintenance and Production personnel (hourly and leadership)
6. No equipment problem should last more than 7 days, if so, call an expert outside your plant and outside your company
7. Education of all Maintenance Personnel is critical to optimization of any Maintenance Organization

Figure 5: Maintenance dashboard example

The next step is to develop a maintenance dashboard that has a live comparison of specific
KPls which validate each other. This is like driving down the road in your car and looking at all
the gauges; if one is flashing red, you may need to stop and solve the problem. The KPI
dashboard concept is the same. This specific one can be fed by an Excel program, which is
populated by your CMMS/EAM or other data source.
To build the dashboard, begin by identifying three questions that you would like to know the
answer to on a weekly or monthly basis, which would confirm or deny all KPls are accurate.

Question 1: Are work orders closed out accurately? (Planner closes work order.)
Question 2: Is the data accurate? (Review data accuracy monthly.)
Question 3: Are my metrics improving because our actions are effective?

Step #4: Create and Manage the Plant with a "Plant

Scoreboard"
Post the plant scoreboard on video monitors or charts in the plant, in all production areas and
in the maintenance shop.

Figure 6: Plant scoreboard example

Definitions
Without a definition, you just have someone's opinion.

Wrench Time: "Hands-on tool time" or the time your people are actually "turning wrenches" or
performing proactive work. Also is one indicator of whether your planning and scheduling
functions are meeting requirements.

Wrench Time Study

By Ricky Smtth

■ Looking for Part - 25%

■ Waiting on Others -14%
Looking for Tools - 36%
Waiting on Equipment-11%
■Looking for Specification - 5%
Waiting on Permit -3%
■Waiting on Supervisor -6%

Figure 7: Results from author's wrench time study

World-class wrench time is 55%-65%. Note: If your wrench-time is 25%, and you improve it to
50%, you just increased the amount of proactive work being conducted by 100%. A workforce of
ten maintenance people at 25% wrench time that moves to 50% wrench time is now completing
twice as much effective maintenance work with the same number of technicians.

Preventive Maintenance: Actions performed on a time- or machine-run-based schedule that

detect, preclude, or mitigate degradation of a component or system, with the aim of sustaining
or extending its useful life through controlling degradation to an acceptable level.

Planned Work: The percent of work orders which have all the defined fills filled in. A planned
job, at the minimum, should have:
• Repeatable, effective work procedures
• Equipment specifications and standards
• Required parts and potential parts
• Coordination required and with whom and when
• Warnings and cautions
• Craft and estimated labor hours
• Actual prep and execution time
Planned work objective: A repeatable/effective PM, repair, rebuild, lubrication, etc.

Scheduled Compliance: The scheduling of maintenance labor in coordination with operations,

contractors, engineering, and safety personnel to minimize interruption to operations and
production. Also, to ensure the work is completed on time, effectively, and is measured by day
and by hour. Scheduled compliance is measured by dividing the total labor hours available (all
maintenance labor hours with the exception of people who are on vacation or sick leave) into
the total labor hours completed by day and by week. I know people like to move the work
because of issues from day to day. That is acceptable however you do not receive compliance
for it. The items which are taken away from scheduled compliance will be identified in a Wrench
Time Study.

Conclusion
If you want to succeed, take things one step at a time as I stated in my article and stay
FOCUSED. People love to be successful, and these ideas allow a maintenance crew to be
successful. I am telling you these things having been in maintenance management myself; I
have seen many companies succeed around the world following these recommendations. I
would like to add you to the list.

Do not strive to be "world-class," strive to be the best you can be.

Questions? rsmith@worldclassmaintenance.org